The Winter Sea (13 page)

I wasn’t holding out much hope, when I sat down to write.

It would be gone, I knew. The dream I’d had last night would be long gone. It was no use.

But when I turned on the computer and my fingers touched the keyboard, I surprised myself. I hadn’t lost it after all. It was all there, the whole of it, and as I wrote each detail I remembered having dreamed it. I could not recall this happening in all the years that I’d been writing. It felt…well, like I’d said to Jane, it felt the way a medium must feel, when they were channeling the dead.

The story flowed from my subconscious in an easy, rapid stream. I saw the leering face of Billy Wick, the gardener, and the smile of Kirsty’s sister in her cottage, with the children playing round the gentle mastiff, and I felt Sophia’s sadness as she spoke about her parents, and her thrill of expectation as she saw the ship at anchor near the castle, and the mad confusion of her run with Kirsty to the house, and Rory’s warning they should get inside, before the countess missed them.

And tonight, my writing went beyond the dream. And there was more.

IV

S
HE HAD NO TIME
to change her gown before the countess called for her. She had just reached her chamber and had seen with her own eyes, within the looking-glass, the rare disorder of her hair, the wild color that her run along the clifftop had raised in her cheeks.

And there was Kirsty, breathless too, and knocking at her door to say the countess had requested that Sophia join her downstairs in the drawing room.

‘I cannot go like this,’ Sophia said.

‘Och, ye look fine. ’Tis but your hair that needs attention.’ And with reassuring hands, the housemaid helped Sophia smooth her windblown curls and pin them back into their proper style. ‘Now, go. Ye canna keep her waiting.’

‘But my gown is muddied.’

‘She will never see it,’ Kirsty promised. ‘Go.’

Sophia went. Downstairs, she found the countess in an outward state of calm, but standing close beside the windows of the drawing room as though she were anticipating something and did not wish to be sitting when it came. She held her hands toward Sophia with a smile. ‘Come stand with me, my child. We will this day have visitors, who may be in this household for a month or more. I wish you to be at my side, when I do bid them welcome.’

Sophia was amazed, and touched. ‘You do me an honor.’

‘You are,’ the countess told her, plain, ‘a member of this family. It is fitting you should stand where my own daughters would be standing, were they not already married and departed from me.’ She paused, as though what she meant next to say took thought, and needed to be weighed. ‘Sophia, in the coming months, there will be much that you will see and hear within these walls. I pray that you will understand, and find the means to let it rest with ease upon your conscience.’

There were heavy steps within the hall, and voices, and then Kirsty came ahead and at the open door announced the guests: ‘My lady, here are Colonel Hooke and Mr Moray.’

For Sophia, that small moment which came afterwards would evermore be burned within her memory. She never would forget.

Two men stepped through the doorway of the drawing room, but she saw only one. The man who entered first, with hat in hand, and crossed to greet the countess, might have been a shade, for all Sophia paid him notice. She was looking at the man who’d come behind, and who now stood two paces back and waited, at a soldier’s ease.

He was a handsome man, not over tall, but with the broadened shoulders and well-muscled legs of one who did not live a soft and privileged life, but earned his pay with work. He wore a wig, as fashion did demand of any gentleman, but while the wigs of most men were yet long about the shoulders, his was short at top and sides, drawn back and tied with ribbon in a queue that neatly hung behind. He wore a leather buffcoat, with no collar and no sleeves, split at the sides for riding, with a long row of ball buttons up the front, and at the back a black cloak fastened to the coat below the shoulders, hanging full so that it covered half the sword hung from the broad belt passing over his right shoulder. His sleeves were plain, as was the neckcloth knotted at his throat, and his close-fitting breeches ended at the knees in stiff dragoon boots, not in buckled shoes and stockings.

To Sophia’s mind, he cut a proud, uncompromising figure, yet his grey eyes, in that handsome and impassive face, were not unkind. They swung to hers in silence, and she could not look away.

Could scarcely breathe, in fact. And so she was relieved to hear the countess speak her name in introduction to the first man, who now stood quite close beside her. ‘Colonel Hooke, may I present Sophia Paterson, the niece of my late cousin, come to live with me at Slains and bring some brightness to my days.’

Colonel Hooke was taller than his soldierly companion, and his clothes were of a finer cut, with holland sleeves and edgings of expensive lace. He wore the high-arched periwig she was more used to seeing, and his manners were the manners of a gentleman. ‘Your servant,’ he said, bending to her hand. He had an Irish voice, she noted, pleasant in its tone. He told the countess, ‘And in turn, I would present to you my traveling companion, Mr Moray, who is brother to the Laird of Abercairney.’

‘We are already acquainted.’ The countess smiled, and to the silent Mr Moray said, ‘It was not quite four years ago, I do believe, in Edinburgh. You traveled with your uncle, and were kind enough to bring me certain letters for my husband, I recall.’

He gave a nod, and crossed the room to greet the countess with respect. Sophia waited, eyes cast down, and then his deep Scots voice said, ‘Mistress Paterson, your servant,’ and her hand was taken firmly in his own, and in that swift, brief contact something warm, electric, jolted up her arm. She mumbled something incoherent in reply.

Colonel Hooke said to the countess, ‘Do I understand your son is not, at present, with you here at Slains?’

‘He is not. But he is soon expected, and I do have several letters of his which he does desire that I should put into your hands.’ Her tone turned serious. ‘You do know that the Union has been ratified by parliament?’

Hooke seemed to find the news not unexpected. ‘I did fear it.’

‘It has happened to the discontent and hearty dislike of our people, and the peers and other lords, together with the members of the parliament, are all returned now to their residences in the country. Only my son, and the Earl Marischal, and His Grace the Duke of Hamilton do yet remain at Edinburgh. The last two of these men, so I have been informed, are dangerously ill, and are not fit to travel.’

‘I am sad to hear it,’ Hooke said, frowning. ‘I did write the Duke of Hamilton before our ship set sail. I asked that he might send some person, well-instructed, who could wait upon me here.’

The countess nodded. ‘He did send a Mr Hall, a priest, who kindly served as guide for Mistress Paterson when they came north from Edinburgh. Mr Hall consented to stay with us, and did wait for you a month, but he could wait no longer.’

Hooke looked disappointed. ‘We have been delayed at Dunkirk these past weeks. The winds were contrary.’

Dunkirk, Sophia thought. So they had come from France. And from the pallor of Hooke’s face, their journey had not been a gentle one.

The countess, who missed little, must have drawn the same conclusion, for she said to Colonel Hooke that their delay was of no consequence. ‘But surely you must both be very weary from your voyage. Colonel, please do read your letters, and refresh yourself. There will be time for talk when you have rested.’

‘You are kind. ’Tis sure that traveling by ship does never much improve my health. I should prefer the most ill-tempered horse beneath me to the calmest sea.’

Sophia bravely glanced toward the place where Mr Moray stood in patient silence, noting that the sea did not appear to have in any way affected
his
health. He looked to be fit enough to stand all day, as he was standing, letting others make the conversation. She recalled her father saying, ‘Men who watch, and say but little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.’ She had a feeling that, in this man’s case, it might be true.

Aware of her appraisal, Moray’s grey eyes shifted quietly to hers, and once again she found she had no will to break the contact.

‘Come, Sophia,’ said the countess, ‘we shall give our visitors some peace.’ And with a smile the countess took her gracious leave of both the gentlemen, and in her wake, Sophia did the same, not daring this time to look back.

She found a refuge in the little corner sewing room, where for a mindless hour or so she struggled with her needlework and tried to think of nothing else. Her fingertips were painful from the needle-pricks when she at last gave up and went to look for Kirsty, hoping that companionship might have success where solitude had failed.

At this hour of day, and with guests in the house, Kirsty should have been setting the dining room table for supper, but she was not there. Sophia was still standing in that room, in faint confusion, when the rustling of a woman’s gown, in concert with more manly, measured steps, approaching down the corridor, intruded on her thinking.

The voice of the Countess of Erroll was serious. ‘So, Colonel, I should advise you to not be in haste. You will find his affairs greatly altered, within these past months. All the world has abandoned him, and all the well-affected have come to an open rupture with him. He is suspected of holding a correspondence with the court of London, therefore it would serve you well to be upon your guard before you trusted much to him.’

They were near the open doorway of the dining room. Sophia smoothed her gown and linked her fingers and prepared an explanation of her presence there, for it seemed sure to her they would come in. But they did not. The footsteps and the rustling passed her by, and when Hooke spoke next he had moved too far away for her to know his words.

She felt relieved. She had not meant to listen to a private conversation, and it would have pained her had the countess known she’d done it, even if it were by accident. Eyes briefly closed, she waited one more minute before stepping out herself into the corridor to carry on her search for Kirsty.

She could not have said from which direction Mr Moray had been coming, nor how boots like his upon the floorboards could have made no sound. She only knew that when she stepped out through the doorway he was there, and had it not been for his swift reflexive grabbing of her shoulders, their collision would have surely damaged more than her composure.

He had clearly not expected her to be there either, for his first reaction was to swear, then to retract the oath and ask for her forgiveness. ‘Did I hurt ye?’

‘Not at all.’ She drew back quickly—just a little bit too quickly—from his grasp. ‘The fault is mine. I did not look where I was going.’

He seemed taller here, at such close quarters. If she kept her eyes fixed front, they looked directly on a level with his throat, above the knotted neckcloth. He had taken off the buffcoat and replaced it with a jacket of a woven dark green fabric set with silver buttons. She did not look higher.

He seemed interested by her voice. ‘Your accent,’ he said, ‘does not come from Edinburgh.’

She could not think why that would matter, until she remembered that the countess, just that afternoon, had told the men that Mr Hall had journeyed with Sophia up from Edinburgh. Surprised that Mr Moray would have taken note of such a trifle, she said, ‘No. I did but break my journey there.’

‘Where do ye come from, then?’

‘The Western Shires. You would not know the town.’

‘I might surprise ye with my knowledge.’

So she told him, and he nodded. ‘Aye, ’tis near Kirkcudbright, is it not?’ She felt him looking down at her. ‘Are ye then Presbyterian?’

She couldn’t tell him that she was not anything; that living in her uncle’s house, she’d long since lost her faith. Instead she said, ‘My parents were, and I was so baptized, but I was brought up by my aunt and uncle as Episcopalian.’

‘That does explain it.’

Curiosity compelled her to look up at last, and see that he was smiling. ‘What does it explain?’

‘Ye do not have the long and disapproving face,’ he told her, ‘of a Presbyterian. Nor would a lass who goes God-fearing to the Kirk be like to run so free and wanton on the hills above the shore, for God and all the world to see. Unless it was not you I saw this afternoon, when we were being rowed to land?’

She stared at him and made no answer, for it was quite clear he did not need one.

‘Faith, lass,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to look like that. Ye’d not be beaten for it, even if I had a mind to tell. But in the future, if ye wish to keep your pleasures secret, ye’d do well to wash the mud stains from your gown before ye come to greet your company.’

And with that small bit of advice, he took his solemn leave of her and left her in the corridor, and she—

The phone rang loudly, for the second time. Like scissors rending fabric, it effectively destroyed the flow of words, the mood, and with a sigh I stood and went to answer it.

‘Bad timing?’ guessed my father, at the other end.

I lied. ‘Of course not. No, I was just finishing a scene.’ I was out of my writer’s trance, now, and more fully aware of who I was, and where I was, and who was on the phone. And then I started worrying, because my father almost never called me, so I asked, ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, we’re fine. But you’ve got me back onto the trail of the McClellands. I haven’t done much on them lately, but I thought I’d take minute on the internet, and see if there was anything new on the IGI.’

The IGI, or International Genealogical Index, was one of the most useful tools for family history searchers. It was created and maintained by the Church of Latter Day Saints, whose members went worldwide to search out every single register of marriages and births in every church that they could find. They put the pages of those registers on microfilm, transcribed them, and then indexed them. And now, with the arrival of the internet, the indexes were easier to access, to my father’s great delight.

The index was constantly being updated. When my father had last done a search for McClellands, he hadn’t been able to find any entries that matched
our
McClellands, the ones in the old family Bible. But this time…